Presently, the 4:4:4 format of the International Telecommunication Union, Telecommunication Sector (ITU-T) H.264 standard (hereinafter the “H.264 standard”) only codes one of three channels as luma, with the other two channels being coded as chroma using less efficient tools. When an input to a codec is in the 4:4:4 format with full resolution in every input component, coding two out of the three input components with the less effective chroma coding algorithm results in the use of more bits in those two channels. This particular problem is more noticeable in intra frames. For example, the H.264 standard running in the Intra-Only mode is less efficient than JPEG2k for overall compression quality at 40 dB (PSNR) and above.
Accordingly, it would be desirable and highly advantageous to have methods and apparatus for video encoding and decoding that overcome the above-described disadvantages of the prior art.